Clark Sell @ Allstate Insurance

Senior Application Architect and Web Developer

Roles and Responsibilities

Senior Application Architect and Web Developer

Common Business Services – Lead Architect and Program Manager charged to create a Service Oriented Architecture comprised of a suite of common and authoritative services as well as SOA guidelines for Allstate.

Staffed and Trained Northbrook and Northern Ireland development teams.

Implemented Agile Development processes.

Implemented Cruise Control and NAnt supporting the suite of services in the SOA.

Lead and delivered first defect free new development, high impact project into production.

Enterprise .NET Framework – Lead Architect and Program Manager building the first funded Enterprise Framework for all .NET applications. Known as the AllCorp Framework, it was the first high impact mainstream development project where Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration and Agile Development Methodologies were introduced to the entire Allstate Enterprise. Working in two week iterations with 25 different customers, an entire framework was built nearly defect free and meeting all customer expectations.

Implemented packaging standards for distribution to developers and applications.

Facilitated all communications to business clients and Allstate Officers in terms of framework features, architecture and release schedules.

Implemented Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration.

Created Test Driven Development standards for application development communities.

Created, packaged and communicated a distribution for NAnt, NUnit and Cruise Control which included the products as well as best practices.

Allstate.com, AccessAllstate.com Integration – Lead Architect and Program Manager creating the first cross company web service providing a single-sign-on (SSO) for the Allstate customer.

First introduction of an Agile Development process on a mainstream development project.

First introduction of Test Driven Development on mainstream development project.

Designed and created a WS-Security framework sitting on top of WSE for web services.

First deployment of WSE in Allstate.

Created logical and physical data model for SSO and exception handling.

AccessAllstate.com – Lead Application Architect for Allstate Financial Technology, AccessAllstate.com. First Allstate .NET project released into production shortly after .NET released to public. Access Allstate was an N-Tier project utilizing .NET, SQL Server, Biz Talk, Java and a various number of the 14 administration systems at Allstate Financial. AccessAllstate.com provided a unified book of business to the agency providing the ability to view and transact on a financial policy.

Designed and Created Visual Studio solution structure used by entire development staff.

Designed and created web application security framework. Responsibilities included validating and creating a security data model and core security activities such as login, logout, password change, password history, and impersonation.

Conducted design and code reviews.

Mentored and provided direction to development staff of 40 developers.

Responsible for communication to management and architectural communities.

Design and implemented Allstate Financial Jumpstart kit. The Jumpstart kit contained a suite of architectural services and application architecture providing the ability for an application to unpack the Jumpstart kit into source control and have an N-Tier web application architecture ready to begin coding application functionality. Architectural services included the following: Data Access, Remoting, Security, Codes and Caching. The jumpstart kit was implemented by at least 30 applications and some reported savings of 50% decrease in development time and cost.

Multi Access Integration – Starting as an Application Developer exiting as an Application Architect, Multi Access Integration (MAI) was Allstate’s first external web development project. MAI provided the customer with the ability to quote and buy homeowners and property insurance without agent interaction. Later releases would start to provide the first external web service for insurance aggregators to use for quotes.